Today I Learned
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"No one ever went broke making a profit." -
Think of DNA as data. Nature and Humans are walking storages of data. -
Thousands of independent authors have already earned more than $50,000 in KDP royalties so far in 2022, and more than 2,000 of those authors have surpassed $100,000 in royalties. -
Number one way to get people to buy your product? - Besides building an internet audience, If you want someone to want something, tell them they can’t have it or build virality into the product. - Greg Isenberg
Columbus convinced Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella that he should be given 10% of all revenues from his discovered lands, and be made governor of any lands he discovered. He turned out to be such a bad governor that he was arrested and his contract was abrogated. He and his heirs sued for hundreds of years.
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish." - , 1974 and repurposed by Steve Jobs - matches my Personal Value
Find the torture you are comfortable with and you'll do well. - Jerry Seinfeld on Howard's show
Bryan and Rob conclude that if you want to understand the world, you’re better off blocking news websites and spending your time on Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or reading a textbook. And if you want to generate political change, stop reading about problems you already know exist and instead write your political representative a physical letter — or better yet, go meet them in person.
Picasso’s Bull Principle - you can't draw the full picture until you understand the essence
The Happiness Test - Ask yourself if the outcome of your decision, good or bad, will likely have a significant effect on your happiness in a year. If the answer is no, the decision passes the test, which means you can speed up. Repeat for a month and a week. The shorter the time period for which you answer is no, it won’t much affect my happiness, the more you can trade off accuracy in favor of saving time.
The Untangle Test - If you put your best solution vs. a problem, does the story of how it will solve the problem sound naive?
The CEO Test - Imagine presenting an ugly compromise to the CEO. What do we think of that argument? Do we believe we can hold our ground on this?
The Mom Test - Dig into the specifics. Don't believe opinions, hypothetical & general answers. Avoid even asking general/hypothetical questions.
The Only-Option Test - If this would be the only option I had would I be happy with it.
Reminder of Pareto Principle continues to be true:
When the tree falls monkeys scatter - Chinese saying
"Give to people what they want. Then, later, you can give them what you want." - The Big Night
"Bit your teeth into the ass of life..." - the Big Night
1. learn a lot about things that matter, majority isn’t usually right in what matters. 2 Work on problems that interest you. 3 with people you like and respect. Notice the missing. Bridge the gap to the future. Live in the future and build what I’m seeing. Stop seeing the state of teh world as set. When something annoys you it could be because you’re living in the future. Working on toys and side projects build things before startups. - From Paul Graham blog.
You can gain a lot by being lazy. Especially the time to work on what matters. - unknown
Wisdom is the only thing that makes growing old worth it. - From Naruto
New bourgeoisie don’t build new things. Capitalists do. - Burnowitz
Stop pursuing status at the expense of doing the work.
A’s hire A’s, but B’s hire C’s.
When you part without lies, you can meet without shame.
The people above should always run twice the speed
None of us are born stoic, otherwise we wouldn’t cry when we’re little. - I think Ryan Holiday in his Daily Stoic podcast
I believe in aliens more than in love. - Prague, Palmovka
Mind Share. Akin to brand awareness. When people are talking about your product more than your competitor's, you'll likely sell more whatever the quality of your product is. - Build, Tony Fadell
During hot weeks people crank up their ACs all at once causing energy companies to turn on extra power plants. NEST thermostat allowed customers to optin to turn on the ac sooner than the rest, preveneting the extra polution and energy expenditure, while saving its customers money. - Build, Tony Fadell
People say that time flies quickly, but it only goes unaccounted. - Matthew Dicks, Lenny's Podcast
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. — William Morris
Teens and preteens today baulk at the idea of paying any money for a game, evidenced by the comments on any indie developer's TikTok account. A friend of mine loves to tell the story of a Zoomer who begged him to make the game free "just for the first 24 hours". When he got no response, he reduced the number to five hours, then one. It was during the Flash game boom that such a Faustian bargain was first brokered - we agreed to expose ourselves to minute amounts of advertising in return for free entertainment. Now, most indie games are worthless. I would know - I have to sell them. - A Profound Waste of Time 3
Sprezzatura is the capacity to make the difficult seem easy. Magic happens behind the scene the more you open the curtain the less magical it will appear, avoid the need to have your vanity validated by showcasing the hard work. - - The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione
Withdrawal and disappearance are classic ways of controlling the options. You give people a sense of how things will fall apart without you, and you offer them a "choice": I stay away and you suffer the consequences, or I return under circumstances that I dictate. - 48 Laws of Power, Robert Green
AIs, in Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s view, will soon “possess a historical consciousness far superior to ours,” allowing them to “make better, faster, and more varied history than we ever did,” with the result that we’ll leave the business of history writing to them.
“We learn from reflection on experience, not from experience itself.” — John Dewey, Philosopher
Book sales: 20,000 copies = book bestseller, 2,000 = average US lifetime, 3.4M = 20 years of sales best case example (Eat That Frog!)
I keep thinking about the quote: “You feel the most lonely when you need to be by yourself.” This applies to me in every other way. To my addictive personality. To me wanting what I seek.
Bullshit jobs - . David Greaber is my favorite writer. I am keen on anthropologists with social morale as a north star. While sadly no longer with us, I keep discovering his writing: "Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic." I have arrived at the same conclusion in my own pondering of the world. 2023 spelled out the end to the Spend-To-Grow mentality for Tech Startups. This article from 2018 highlights the reason for the dramatic layoffs throughout the corporate tech world. Great many people did absolute minimum in terms of the output. It confirms my feeling of the space, when reading on the internet, listening to conversations at events. Very little work gets done. Corporate battled it with more hiring. Common sense, sustainability (not of the eco kind) had taken over. Get my signature for the approach. It’s great, but.. I was a year away from riding the wave of getting paid for nothing. I feel cheated.
Internet, which is to say it is defined by abundance…The goal is not to pick out the hits, but rather to attract as much content as possible, and then algorithmically boost whatever turns out to be good. -
. "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius." Climbing Camp 4 in Yosemite. - Brian Eno
- Tim Urban "The first iPhone was such a big deal because it launched a new S. Investors had a new place to pour their money. Developers had a new place to pour their efforts."
"Creativity is intelligence having fun." - everyone thinks Albert Einstein, but George Scialabba ()
Build community with your writing: BookScan found that only 6.7 percent of the new titles released by these companies were selling more that 10,000 copies in their first year of sales, only 12.3 percent were selling more than 5,000 copies in their first year, and only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year. -
